New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx
😡
Recently, (recommended) prices at @joinprolific.bsky.social have doubled. Simultaneously, data quality and collection speed seem to have gone down noticeably (especially speed). Are others having this experience?
These changes make the platform significantly less viable for our lab.
We plan to hire a post doc to start in Fall 2026 (flexible), in the Aulet Lab at UMass Amherst, funded for two years. The postdoc will help establish our developmental fMRI research program studying symbolic number acquisition in 4-8 year old children (among other things!).
A few years ago, my favorite website (@puddingviz.bsky.social) put out this great piece analyzing a study of how randomizing ability changes with age. It includes demos where readers produce sequences of random coin flips, dice rolls, and locations in a 3x3 grid. pudding.cool/2022/04/rand...
Definitely very interesting! I’m glad I’ve learned about the concept!
Great! We hoped you would. Obviously many of these ideas stem from your work!
I've also put up a separate page on the lab website where you can see some of these illusions more easily via improved, dynamic versions of the figures: spatialcognitionlab.org/spacetime
(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions.
@brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here:
rdcu.be/e5SWo
I feel like I remember being a pilot subject ~5 years ago, wow
Very proud that this is finally out!
Come for the new auditory illusion, stay for the brain imaging and speech analysis…..
first empirical paper from the Aulet lab! What does learning to count do to a brain? We trained neural networks on different tasks and only counting (i.e., predicting the number of dots in a dot array) reorganized representations around number. New preprint:
I am very grateful to Nessa and Maggie of Thoughtscape for all the energy they put into this project. In addition to being happy with the end result, I also greatly enjoyed the processed of brainstorming with them over many months. I highly recommend them!!
Over the past several months, I've been working (in collaboration with www.thoughtscape.com) to rebrand my lab and improve our website. This new version better captures our core interests/ideas. I'm really, really thrilled with how things turned out: spatialcognitionlab.org
In a new paper, I delve into these two findings and muse on when prediction might help vs. hurt memory (and discuss why this matters for models of memory and the hippocampus). This is my first solo-author paper, and I had a lot of fun putting these ideas on paper! direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...
I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion!
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
This dispute will have to be settled 'on the field' next semester. Looking forward to it. 👋
Last night, we hosted the inaugural momentslab.org vs. spatialcognitionlab.org competition. After going down early following a disappointing Jenga loss, our team rallied to a 2-1 victory, winning in Codenames and pool. Proud to have won against such tough competition! 🏆
Hey! We discussed this work in a review paper of ours that is currently under review. Great work!
Our experience of time is powerfully shaped by boundaries between events (i.e., going from one meeting to the next). But what about time *within an event*? In new work, we find reliable distortions of time based on internal event structure (e.g., beginnings, middles, and ends)! tinyurl.com/n8mn2sn7
There’s a deep difference between sentences like:
(1) Jane caused the glass to break.
vs.
(2) Jane broke the glass.
A surge of experimental philosophy research has led to some surprising discoveries about sentences like (2)
[Thread]
Are OSF view-only links broken? A journal keeps un-submitting our paper because the link doesn't work, but (a) it did work, just before the update, and (b) it says it should be working as usual in the OSF interface.
Anyone else having this problem, or know of a solution?
Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving
With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland
Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014...
A short thread [1/5]👇
Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵
Last month, I launched my lab at Ohio State. Our lab website is now live, and we're recruiting graduate students this cycle! If you're interested in the cognitive (neuro)science of learning & memory, please reach out!
www.momentslab.org
How does spontaneous memory reinstatement at rest relate to episodic memory during development? And how do early experiences influence neural mechanisms of episodic memory encoding and reinstatement? New preprint! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
smh the bots are just repeating themselves at this point
I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you.
www.cogdevlab.org
Isn't the Filled Duration Illusion usually about filling spaces with other discrete entities (analogous to the visual Oppel-Kundt illusion)? If so, I think those effects are substantively different, personally!
Very excited to have @brynnsherman.bsky.social join us for the next @timingresforum.bsky.social Virtual Journal Club! Please join us for what should be a very interesting talk on her recent work! Sign-up details below:
mailchi.mp/28692b147cb0...
